The Sleeping Bag Landscape

Abstract

This essay considers the ‘sleeping-bag’ as a travelling concept for developing new relations between the landscape and textiles. It examines the sleeping-bag within the wider historical and cultural contexts in which the material qualities of cloth are carried and transformed. By examining the appearance of the sleeping-bag in different landscapes and its own structure as a vehicle for conceptual thinking, the essay considers how certain strategies of thinking-through-making are brought to the fore in the analysis of specific examples, from an examination of the interconnectedness between materials and the landscapes from which they derive to the distancing of this relation as the sleeping-bag travels through unfamiliar terrains and climates. In turn, this cultural analysis provides the framework for The Sleepingbag Project, which was first developed in 2010 and which uses the tools and skills of craft to reveal unacknowledged and hidden identity relations between craft-making and homelessness. It is argued that through this project an identity of place for the displaced is made possible in and through an ethics of care.